Vanderbilt History Seminar 2012-2013

This theme will explore the history of heterodox, or dissenting, ideas, traditions, communities, and practices across a wide range of societies and centuries. It will examine not merely formally defined and anathematized heterodoxies, but a wide range of challenges to conventional outlooks, practices, and normative beliefs. A great deal of work on what we are calling heterodoxy is underway in the subfields of religion, politics, gender and sexuality, and the history of medicine and science, among others. Religious sects and schisms, slave religions, and utopian communities; social movements that challenge mainstream, or orthodox, conceptions of politics, sexuality, gender roles and family life; “heretical” ideas about disease and health, the universe (Galileo), the economy (Keynes) and race: all these topics, and others, fall within the ambit of the heterodoxies theme. We want to explore the diverse meanings of heterodoxies as well as the historical circumstances under which heterodoxies emerged, flourished, and supplanted orthodoxies, or were contained, co-opted, and crushed. Heterodoxies often drew the attention of (or became the occasion for calling into being) powerful institutions charged with eliminating dissent, purging political nonconformity, or imposing doctrinal purity. The auto-da-fé of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, the public executions of the French Revolutionary Terror, and the Stalinist gulags stand among the most famous examples of this tendency to root out heterodoxy through violence. Heterodoxies have sometimes themselves become violent, as the cases of early twentieth century anarchism and late twentieth-century strains of radical Islam demonstrate. Authorities have also tried to label, contain, and sometimes impugn heterodoxies by generating scientific discourses about deviance; heterodoxies, from this perspective, are bound up with the production of knowledge. Encounters between the heterodox and the orthodox, both violent and nonviolent, both formal (through state and scientific interventions) and informal (through the activities of everyday life), thus constitute an additional subject for this VHS theme. Precisely because the question of heterodoxies appears both specific and flexible, it promises to become a key concept in historical research that can cut across fields and bring historians into productive conversations. Given the scope of its interests, VHS is well placed to make an important contribution to this project.